Beyond Graphics – The Present and Future of GP-GPU (H.264 encoding)

[admin]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2324320,00.asp

This is a good look at future usages for GP-GPU (General Purpose GPU), including H.264 transcoding.

Nvidia recently showed off a demo where a 3 GHz quad-core with integrated graphics needing 5hr 33min to encode a 2Hr HD movie in H.264.

With the GP-GPU (GTX280), it only took 35 minutes on a 1.6 GHz dual-core!

Amazingly, the same dual-core setup with integrated graphics took 10 hours to encode the same file.

The only thing stopping people using H.264 right now is encoding speed. If this bottleneck can be eliminated, the potential for H.264 is vast. Let's just hope Nvidia/ATi and current H.264 developers can get together and get the code all in order to take advantage.

[atifsh]

yes and then we need standalone dvd players that support different H.264 formats.

[admin]

Most of the Blu-ray players should already support that. H.264 is a bit too complex for your average DVD player to handle, not at the current price points. But with Toshiba going ahead with DVD 2.0 (h.264 on DVD @ 720p), this should mean a new generation of DVD players that has H.264 decoding, although DVD 2.0 probably won't have much success as a format.

[admin]

Folding@Home and similar types applications are currently supported and will be the first major uses for GP-GPUs (all Nvidia 8xxx series or later supports CUDA, the programming environment that allows this to happen). It was only a matter of time before video encoding started using the same technology, all it would take now is someone to take x264 and make it CUDA compatible. Nvidia are very keen to demonstrate the power of its GPUs, and because of the parallel and optimised nature of their GPUs, it's more efficient at these kinds of things than an all purpose CPU.

It's not time yet for Intel to become worried, but the recent battle of words between Intel and Nvidia could be a sign of the future, as the definition between CPU and GPU get more and more blurred.